September Update & Plans!

This Month

Starting this month, I want to bring a little more focus to my projects. I have, over time, acquired too many long term projects that simmer away with little obvious progress and lack of deadlines. As I turn more of my attention to working on things, I want to try to get some of these projects actually out and in the hands of the D&D playing wilds out there.

We saw a little of this recently with Occultist 1.0 and Psion 1.3 both finally getting out the door, but we'll go to a somewhat more structured monthly approach this month, with one overarching "big" goal that will have weekly progress updates for that month, and than a generous dose of content that comes from requests, commissions, and of course random inspiration.

So without beating around the bush too much, here's our plan for September:

• Big Project: Crafting. I don't know if I will finish the system this month, but I'll aim to give weekly updates and start moving big chunks of it into public testing and feedback stages.
• Secondary Projects: Runesmith for Artificer, a Warlock subclass based mobility and shadows, a Wizard subclass based around diseases (with some spells and new diseases), revising our Psychic Warrior.

That won't be everything for the month. There are a few other side projects we might see from a variety of things - Feats, Spells, subclasses, the start of future Occutlist subclasses, a few miscellaneous projects and requests I've worked on for people I might share here as well, but as noted, I want to have a bit of a more focused approach on what I will deliver, so I'll focus a bit more the projects above, particular in the context of getting them to you folks out there.

In the future, we'll do this sort of focus with polls, but realistically speaking these were already things that were voted on, they just didn't get across the finish line for public testing before focus shifted to other things.

If there's any particular project you want an update on the status and current testing of, feel free to reach out.

The Future

Forgive me for rambling about myself for a second; this is going somewhere... 

As some of you know, I used to work in the video game industry; eventually I left that moving onto to the more traditional corporate world, but after having had the... opportunity... of more time to spend on working on things like this after parting ways with my company due to various COVID related restructuring (leaving me working on an international schedule that didn't really work...) I'm going to be spending this new found time seeing if I can turn the things I enjoy (like this) into more of my career. I find that creating content here has a positive interaction with the world in general - I like making, and people like using it; everyone is having fun.

I don't want to change necessarily how I make stuff - moving to the DMsGuild (for example) is not currently in the cards, and consequently I know that there's always going to be a challenge when turning a hobby into a part of a career. But I'm giving various thoughts to how I keep the general ethos of what I do and see if I can expand it. Part of that is more focused approach to making content above, and part of that is considering what form the stuff I may is.

This leads to...

Kickstarters & Compendiums

My current plan, subject to change, is collect my work into more polished and easy to consume compendiums, in print and PDF form with various extras, more tables for fluff, more loot, and more supporting systems for the content, as well as easier to use formats; I suppose the productized version of what I already make.

This won't be an immediate thing. My current plan is to run a Kickstarter either in the second half of October or the first half of November.

Originally I had some various ideas, but the idea I'm currently leaning ward is to go down the compendium route, trying to include more content and making it a more player-options focused book. I think generally speaking player options is the biggest part of what I do and what I'm known for, so making a book more focused on that makes sense. I also feel like I don't necessarily want to hold back - I want to put as much stuff out there as possible. A Compendium couldn't include everything, and I think the first one would be something of Metal and Minds, and include Artificer, Psion, and subclasses for each PHB class based on each (probably 1 each; we have a few of those, and I feel like there's a lot of subclasses to be explored in both of those themes).

And in the future if that's successful, I could do an Occultist & Warlord book or something.

My plan is for all the playable content to be released for free like usual, but the Kickstarter will be for the physical product, and then the PDF will be released for backers at a fairly cheap tier, or through various patreon tiers, and contain more fluff and support for the content in there - sort of like XGE had for it's various content.

Under the theme of Artificers & Psionics, I feel like there's quite a lot of room for content depending on how it goes - perhaps including a small beastiary and additional items willl be small stretch goals - those are things best served with art. While I have a fair bit of art I own the rights to, any attempt to make a book would likely require some more, so the most expensive things to add are those that take art.

The benefits of this route are would come down to three things:

• Print versions. People like printed content, and with this we could do that.
• Professional editing. It's no secret that my editing can be dubious. Anything that's going into a book would have a couple passes from paid and professional editors.
• Expanded Content. A book/compendium gives you space to work with that goes beyond the boundaries of classes to provide variant rules, monsters, NPCs, backgrounds, and character building tables that don't generally fit well into a class format.

Anything I say now is subject to change. I think I will try to do something, because I think I'd regret not trying anything, but the exact shape it ends up is still subject to change. If you want to sign up to be notified when it goes live, there's a page for that:

https://www.kthomebrew.com/notify-me

That email goes directly to my inbox into a special list that'll only be used to notify people about a Kickstarter. It will obviously also be posted here and on Discord.

I thought this would be a Short Post

Anyway... apologies that this is such a long update and ramble, but I suppose its better to have my thoughts and plans out there so people can read what the care about and skim the rest :D

I always want to end on saying thanks - I don't know for sure what the future holds, but for now, I'm going to focus a bit more on this little hobby that so many of you enjoy and support, and that I can do that for at least awhile is thanks to all of you here reading this, so... thanks!

I know the world is a rough place, so here's to hoping your managing to escape it to your nearest fantasy world here and there. Look forward to new content to come!